The Broom of the System (8 page)

“Like the phone company, but not the phone company.”

“Oh.” Lenore looked listlessly at Peter Abbott. “Hi.”

“Well hello hello,” said Peter, winking furiously at Lenore and pulling up his collar. Lenore looked up at Candy as Peter played with something hanging from his tool belt.

“Peter is very friendly, it seems,” said Candy Mandible.

“Hmm.”

“Well I can’t see nothing wrong in there, I’m stumped,” Peter said.

“What’s the problem?” Lenore asked.

“It’s not good,” said Candy. “We I guess more or less don’t have a number anymore. Is that right?” She looked at Peter Abbott.

“Well, you got line trouble,” said Peter.

“Right, which apparently in this case means we don’t have a number anymore, or rather we do, but so does like the whole rest of Cleveland, in that we now all of a sudden
share
a single number with all these other places. All these places that share our line tunnel. You know all those numbers we were just one off of, and we’d just get the wrong numbers all the time—Steve’s Sub, Cleveland Towing, Big B.M. Cafe, Fuss ‘n’ Feathers Pets, Dial-a-Darling? Well now they’re like all the same number. You dial their numbers, and the F and V number rings. Plus a whole lot of new ones: a cheese shop, some Goodyear service office, that Bambi’s Den of Discipline, which by the way gets a disturbing number of calls. We’ve all got the same number now. It’s nuts. Is that right what I said?” she asked Peter Abbott. She got her stuff and got ready to leave, looking at her watch.

“Yeah, line trouble,” Peter Abbott said.

“At least now you’ll have calls. At least now you’ll have something to do for a change,” said Judith Prietht. “Bombardini Company. Bombardini Company.”

“How come she’s not messed up?” Lenore gestured at Judith.

“Different line tunnels,” Peter Abbott said. “Bombardini Inc.’s lines are actually it turns out in this tunnel pretty far away, a few blocks west of Erieview. The calls just get into here via a matrix sharing-thread transfer, which is a real complicated plus ancient thing. Your lines are in a tunnel right under this building, under the lobby, out under that guy’s skeleton.” Peter Abbott pointed at the floor.

“So then why are you up here instead of down with the lines?” Candy Mandible wanted to know.

“I’m not a tunnel man. I’m a console man. I don’t do tunnels. They sent some guy from Tunnels down there early this morning. It’s gotta be his problem. I can’t find nothing up here with what you girls got. This’s a twenty-eight, right? I haven’t lost my mind?”

“Right, Centrex twenty-eight.”

“I know it’s a Centrex, that’s all I do, I’m bored as shit with Centrexes, excuse my French.”

“Well what did the guy from the tunnel say?” Lenore asked. Candy was answering a phone.

“Dunno, ‘cause I haven’t talked to him. I sure can’t call him, am I right?”

“What, we can’t dial out on this, either?”

“I was just makin’ a joke. You can call out OK. Just try again if you get an automatic loop into one of the other in-tunnel points. No, I just hafta talk to the tunnel guy in person, back at the office. We hafta write up reports.” Peter looked at Lenore. “You married?”

“Oh, brother.”

“This one’s not married either, right?” Peter Abbott asked Candy, nodding over at Lenore. His hair wasn’t blond so much as just yellow, like a crayon. His face had the color of a kind of dark nut. Not the sort of tan that comes from the sun. Lenore sensed CabanaTan. The guy looked like a photographic negative, she decided.

He sighed. “Two unmarried girls, in distress, working in this tiny little office ...”

“Women,” Candy Mandible corrected.

“I’m not married either,” Judith Prietht called over. Judith Prietht was about fifty.

“Groovy,” said Peter Abbott.

“So can Bambi and Big Bob and all the others even get any calls, now?” Lenore asked. “Do their phones ring at all?”

“Sometimes, sometimes not,” Peter Abbott said, jingling his belt. “The point is they can’t be sure where it’ll ring, and neither can you, which is obviously subpar service. Your number’s not picking you out of the network like it should, it’s as we say picking out a target set and not a target.”

“Lovely. ”

“At least now you’ll have some calls to answer,” said Judith Prietht. “All you ever get is wrong numbers anyway. You guys are going to go bankrupt. Who ever heard of a publishing house in Cleveland?”

“I like your shoes,” Peter Abbott said to Lenore. “I got some shoes just like that.”

“Does Rick know about all this?” Lenore asked Candy.

Candy stopped. “Rick. Lenore, call him right away.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Who knows what’s ever the matter. All I know is first he just had a complete spasm about your not being here. This was at like ten-o-one. And then now he keeps calling down all the time, to see if you’re here yet. He keeps pretending it’s different people asking for you, holding his nose, putting a hankie over the phone, trying this totally pitiful English accent, pretending it’s outside calls for you, which he should know I can tell it isn’t because he knows the way the console light flashes all fast when they’re in-house calls. God knows he spends enough time down here. And now he hasn’t come down for his paper, even, he’s just sitting up there brooding, playing with his hat.”

“What else does he have to do?” said Judith Prietht, who was unwrapping wax paper from a sandwich and blinking coquettishly at Peter Abbott, who was in turn trying to stare down over the counter into Lenore’s cleavage.

“God, well I really need to talk to him, too,” said Lenore.

“Sweetie, I
forgot
for a second. How just totally
horrible.
You must be out of your head. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I think so. Vern’ll be in at six. I’ll call Rick as soon as I can. I have to call my father, too. And his lawyer.”

“I sense something in the wind,” said Peter Abbott.

“You hush,” said Candy Mandible. She squeezed Lenore’s arm as she passed. “I’m late. I have to go. You come home tonight, hear?”

“I’ll call and let you know,” Lenore said.

“What, you guys are roommates?” Peter Abbott asked.

“Partners in crime,” Judith Prietht snorted.

“Lucky room, is all I can say.”

“Let’s just have a universal dropping dead, except for Lenore,” said Candy. She walked off across the marble lobby floor into the moving blackness.

“She’s got another job?” Peter Abbott asked.

“Yes.” The console beeped. “Frequent and Vigorous.”

“Where at?”

Lenore held up a finger for him to wait while she dealt with somebody wanting to price a set of radials. “Over at Allied Sausage Casings, in East Corinth?” she said when she’d released.

“What a gnarly place to work. What does she do?”

“Product testing. Tasting Department.”

“What a disgusting job.”

“Somebody has to do it.”

“Glad it’s not me, boy.”

“But I do assume you have some kind of job to do? Like fixing our lines?”

“I’m off. I’ll be in touch—if possible.” Peter Abbott laughed and left, jingling. He walked into a moving patch of light in the middle of the lobby and the light disappeared, taking him with it.

The console began to beep.

“Frequent and Vigorous,” Lenore said. “Frequent and Vigorous.”

TRANSCRIPT OF MEETING BETWEEN THE HONORABLE RAYMOND ZUSATZ, GOVERNOR OF THE STATE OF OHIO; MR. JOSEPH LUNGBERG, GUBERNATORIAL AIDE; MR. NEIL OBSTAT, GUBERNATORIAL AIDE; AND MR. ED ROY YANCEY, VICE PRESIDENT, INDUSTRIAL DESERT DESIGN, INCORPORATED, DALLAS, TEXAS; 21 JUNE 1972.

 

OVERNOR: Gentlemen, something is not right.

MR. OBSTAT: What do you mean, Chief?

GOVERNOR: With the state, Neil. Something is not right with our state. MR. LUNGBERG: But Chief, unemployment is low, inflation is low, taxes haven’t been raised in two years, pollution is way down except for Cleveland and who the hell cares about Cleveland—just kidding, Neil—but Chief, the people love you, you’re unprecedentedly ahead in the polls, industrial investment and development in the state are at an all-time high....

GOVERNOR: Stop right there. There you go.

MR. OBSTAT: Can you expand on that, Chief?

GOVERNOR: Things are just too good, somehow. I suspect a trap.

MR. LUNGBERG: A trap?

GOVERNOR: Guys, the state is getting soft. I can feel softness out there. It’s getting to be one big suburb and industrial park and mall. Too much development. People are getting complacent. They’re forgetting the way this state was historically hewn out of the wilderness. There’s no more hewing.

MR. OBSTAT: You’ve got a point there, Chief.

GOVERNOR: We need a wasteland.

MR. LUNGBERG and MR. OBSTAT: A wasteland?

GOVERNOR:
Gentlemen, we need a desert.

MR. LUNGBERG and MR. OBSTAT: A desert?

GOVERNOR: Gentlemen, a desert. A point of savage reference for the good people of Ohio. A place to fear and love. A blasted region. Something to remind us of what we hewed out of. A place without malls. An Other for Ohio’s Self. Cacti and scorpions and the sun beating down. Desolation. A place for people to wander alone. To reflect. Away from everything. Gentlemen, a desert.

MR. OBSTAT: Just a super idea, Chief.

GOVERNOR:
Thanks, Neil. Gentlemen may I present Mr. Ed Roy Yancey, of Industrial Desert Design, Dallas. They did Kuwait.

MR. LUNGBERG: Hey, there’s apparently a lot of desert in Kuwait. MR. YANCEY: You bet, Joe, and we believe we can provide you folks with a really first-rate desert right here in Ohio.

MR. OBSTAT: What about the cost?

GOVERNOR:
Manageable.

MR. LUNGBERG: Where would it be?

MR. YANCEY: Well gentlemen, the Governor and I have conferred, and if I could just direct your attention to this map, here ...

MR. OBSTAT: That’s Ohio, all right.

MR. YANCEY: The spot we have in mind is in the south of your great state. Right about ... here. Actually here to here. Hundred square miles.

MR. OBSTAT: Around Caldwell?

MR. YANCEY: Yup.

MR. LUNGBERG: Don’t quite a few people live around there? GOVERNOR: Relocation. Eminent domain. A desert respects no man. Fits with the whole concept.

MR. LUNGBERG: Isn’t that also pretty near Wayne National Forest?
GOVERNOR:
Not anymore. (Mr.
Lungberg whistles. )

MR. OBSTAT: Hey, my mother lives right near Caldwell.

GOVERNOR: Hits home, eh Neil? Part of the whole concept. Concept has to hit home. Hewing is violence, Neil. We’re going to hew a wilderness out of the soft underbelly of this state. It’s going to hit home.

MR. LUNGBERG: You’re really sold on this, aren’t you, Chief?

GOVERNOR: Joe, I’ve never been more sold on anything. It’s what this state needs. I can feel it.

MR. OBSTAT: You’ll go down in history, Chief. You’ll be immortal.

GOVERNOR: Thanks, Neil. I just feel it’s right, and after conferring with Mr. Yancey, I’m just sold. A hundred miles of blinding white sandy nothingness. ‘Course there’ll be some fishing lakes, at the edges, for people to fish in ...

MR. LUNGBERG: Why white sand, Chief? Why not, say, black sand?

GOVERNOR: Go with that, Joe.

MR. LUNGBERG: Well, really, if the whole idea is supposed to be contrast, otherness, blastedness, should I say sinistemess? Sinistemess is the sense I get.

GOVERNOR: Sinisterness fits, that’s good.

MR. LUNGBERG: Well, Ohio is a pretty white state: the roads are white, the people tend to be on the whole white, the sun’s pretty bright here.... What better contrast than a hundred miles of black sand? Talk about sinister. And the black
would
soak up the heat a lot better, too. Be really hot, enhance the blastedness aspect.

GOVERNOR: I like it. Ed Roy, what do you think? Can cacti and scorpions live in black sand?

MR. YANCEY: No problem I can see.

MR. OBSTAT: What about the cost of black sand?

MR. YANCEY: A little more expensive, probably. I’d have to talk to the boys in Sand. But I feel I can commit now to saying it’d be manageable in the context of the whole project.

GOVERNOR: Done.

MR. LUNGBERG: When do we start?

GOVERNOR: Immediately, Joe. Hewing is by nature a fast, violent thing. MR. OBSTAT: Chief, just let me say I’m excited. You have my congratulations, man to man and citizen to Governor.

GOVERNOR: Thanks, Neil. You better go call your Mom, big fella. MR. OBSTAT: Right.

MR. LUNGBERG: What about a name, Chief?

GOVERNOR: A name? That’s a typically excellent point, Joe. I never thought of the name issue.

MR. LUNGBERG: May I make a suggestion?

GOVERNOR: Go.

MR. LUNGBERG: The Great Ohio Desert.

GOVERNOR: The Great Ohio Desert.

MR.
LUNGBERG:
Yes.

GOVERNOR: Joe, a super name. I take my hat off to you. You’ve done it again. Great. It spells size, desolation, grandeur, and it says it’s in Ohio.

MR. LUNGBERG: Not too presumptuous?

GOVERNOR: Not at all. Fits the concept to a T.

MR. OBSTAT: I take my hat off to you too, Joe.

MR. YANCEY: Damn fine name, Joe.

GOVERNOR: So we’re all set. Concept. Desert. Color. Name. All that’s left is the hewing.

MR. YANCEY: Well let’s get down to it, then.

Suppose someone had said to me, ten years ago, in Scarsdale, or on the commuter train, suppose the person had been my next-door neighbor, Rex Metalman, the corporate accountant with the unbelievable undulating daughter, suppose this was back in the days before his lawn mania took truly serious hold and his nightly paramilitary sentry-duty with the illuminated riding mower and the weekly planeloads of DDT dropping from the sky in search of perhaps one sod webworm nest and his complete intransigence in the face of the reasonable and in the beginning polite requests of one or even all of the neighbors that hostilities against the range of potential lawn enemies that obsessed him be toned down, at least in scale, before all this drove a wedge the size of a bag of Scott’s into our tennis friendship, suppose Rex Metalman had speculated in my presence, then, that ten years later, which is to say now, I, Rick Vigorous, would be living in Cleveland, Ohio, between a biologically dead and completely offensive-smelling lake and a billion-dollar man-made desert, that I would be divorced from my wife and physically distanced from the growth of my son, that I would be operating a firm in partnership with an invisible person, little more, it seems clear now, than a corporate entity interested in failure for tax purposes, the firm publishing things perhaps even slightly more laughable than nothing at all, and that perched high atop this mountain of the unthinkable would be the fact that I was in love, grossly and pathetically and fiercely and completely in love with a person eighteen count them eighteen years younger than I, a woman from one of Cleveland’s first families, who lives in a city owned by her father but who works answering telephones for something like four dollars an hour, a woman whose uniform of white cotton dress and black Converse hightop sneakers is an unanalyzable and troubling constant, who takes somewhere, I suspect, between five and eight showers a day, who works in neurosis like a whaler in scrim shaw, who lives with a schizophrenically narcissistic bird and an almost certainly nymphomaniacal bitch of a roommate, and who finds in me, somewhere, who knows where, the complete lover ... suppose all this were said to me by Rex Metalman, leaning conversationally with his flamethrower over the fence between our properties as I stood with a rake in my hand, suppose Rex had said all this to me, then I almost certainly would have replied that the likelihood of all that was roughly equal to the probability of young Vance Vigorous, then eight and at eight in certain respects already more of a man than I, that young Vance, even as we stood there to be seen kicking a football up into the cold autumn sky and down through a window, his laughter echoing forever off the closed colored suburban trees, of strapping Vance’s eventually turning out to be a ... a
homosexual,
or something equally unlikely or preposterous or totally out of the question.